Julien Sorel is the son of a provincial carpenter but he is determined to rise in the world. His intelligence and his sexual attractiveness provide him with the means to do so. Sorel's hero is the fallen Napoleon but, in the new France of the restored Bourbon monarchs, talents other than military prowess are required. Julien is in training for the priesthood (despite spiritual doubts, he believes the church may offer him a career path to the fame and fortune he craves - the title alludes to the military and clerical lives that draw Sorel). He is taken into the household of Monsieur de Renal as a tutor, where he seduces his employer's wife and is eventually forced to leave to avert a scandal. Back in the seminary, Julien is recommended to a position as personal secretary to a marquis and gets the opportunity to travel to the bright lights of Paris. Scandal threatens again when the marquis's daughter falls in love with him but her father, learning that she is pregnant with Julien's child, intervenes to ensure that the young man gains the noble title that will enable him to be a suitable husband for her. Julien has finally achieved the status in society that he has always believed to be his right but his past comes back to haunt him in the shape of Madame de Renal. Stendhal was the pen name used by the Swiss-born soldier and diplomat Henri-Marie Beyle, whose early career was shaped by his admiration for Napoleon (he was commissioned into the French army when still a teenager and served with the Emperor's headquarters staff on the disastrous invasion of Russia). His career as a writer only really began after Napoleon's downfall. Scarlet and Black (sometimes translated as The Red and the Black) is his finest work, a brilliant portrait of a self-invented adventurer and the society in which he attempts to rise.

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